Book Shows Off Car Culture

Among his massive collection of memorabilia, including newspaper clippings, photographs, and model cars, trucks, and tractors, is the first car magazine Ed Reavie purchased, Motor Trend September 1949. "I was nine years old, a geeky St. Ignace kid, and I came across this customized Ford," he said thumbing through the magazine pages. "I was instantly in love with what George Barris did to this stock 1941 Ford Club Coupe to make it look like this. He redid the car to make it sleek, smooth, low, and really cool cause they were boxy old cars. So I bought the magazine for a quarter and it proved to be a pretty good investment." Now a personal friend of Mr. Reavie's, Mr. Barris is among many customizers who have visited the St. Ignace Car Show. All makes and sizes of model cars, too numerous to count, autographed pictures of celebrities from rock and roll artists to race car drivers, a replica gas station pump, and car magazines fill Ed Reavie's home office. The memorabilia all focuses on his devotion to St. Ignace and his love of automobiles. This May, as one of the founders of the St. Ignace Car Show, he will share his story and photographs in a book, "St. Ignace Car Culture."

Through photographs and stories, Ed Reavie, one of the founders of the St. Ignace Car Show, writes about cars and the role they have played in St. Ignace. This book is scheduled to be released in mid- May for $21.99 by Publishing in South Carolina. The car shows that Mr. Reavie has organized have put St. Ignace on the map with car enthusiasts from all parts of the automotive world. The pictorial history book will outline the three decades of shows that have brought hundreds of thousands of people to this town.

"I've been carting this book around mentally for probably 27 years," said the 1958 LaSalle High School graduate.

Today, after producing 34 years of car shows and meeting celebrities, car designers, and famous automotive customizers, what really thrills Mr. Reavie is that they all came to his small hometown in the Upper Peninsula that "still has no traffic lights."

He uses the observation to end his book.

The story begins years earlier with a small black and white photograph of a baby on the fender of a 1940 Chevrolet pickup truck. The picture is of Mr. Reavie the year he was born. The truck belonged to his father, Kress A. Reavie.

By age 12, he was building his own version of a car from an orange crate equipped with lights and an antenna. To keep him quiet and occupied in church, Ray McLachlan, who owned Ray's Auto Sales in St. Ignace, would bring new car brochures for the youngster to look at during the service. Then, one minute after he turned 16, Mr. Reavie bought his first car, a red 1953 Ford convertible.

"I was always into cars," he recalls. "It's just there. It's in the DNA, you can't get rid of it. The first car I remember that just rocked my boat. I heard this car coming down US-2 and, to this day, it is one of my all-time favorite cars. Picture this car: soft yellow, '47 Ford convertible, top down, spotlights turned down, lowered in the back, fender skirts, and the sweetest set of pipes you ever heard."

Years later at a car show, he found a car almost exactly like it and includes a photograph of the vehicle in his book. The only difference between the two automobiles is the wheel covers.

He remembers being a teenager driving around town, wanting nice cars but with little money in his pockets. The situation forced St. Ignace youth to get creative to achieve the look they wanted, Mr. Reavie says. Spinner hubcaps were a cool car accessory at the time, but too expensive for the local teens. His friend, Calvin "Bucky" McPhee, came up with the idea of using metal shoehorns to create a similar look. The pair screwed four shoehorns onto each hubcap.

"It looked pretty good when they were going around, but stopped, it looked kind of cheesy," recalls Mr. Reavie, laughing. "But we didn't care."

At that time, he was reading car magazines from California. He calls those days "California Dreaming" and details them in the book.

"That was the catalyst that really got me going in the first place," he said. "I was reading all the magazines. They were all published on the West Coast. That's were the cars were. That's where the weather was and the dry roads. The guys there must have made a lot more money than we did because they always had just awesome cars and they were our age."

Before he turned 50 years old, Mr. Reavie traveled to California to visit the shops and meet those car customizers he had been reading about for years.

"That was really an inspiration for me," he said. "It was like going to the Holy Land."

Years later, publishers of the California magazines came to St. Ignace to cover the car show that Mr. Reavie hosts through his company, Nostalgia Productions. He works with a small crew of assistants to put on several successful automotive events at St. Ignace each year.

The California customizers came, he said, because of the "aura of the show, they knew they were going to get taken care of here, and the scenery is spectacular. On a summer day, it doesn't get much better. It really doesn't. Plus, they found that articles on this show sold magazines and they wanted a nice vacation. When we hit the cover of Hot Rod Magazine, it's almost like being on the cover of Rolling Stone. It doesn't say Michigan, doesn't say Upper Peninsula, it just says St. Ignace on the cover. I thought that was the ultimate compliment, like being known by your first name."

Since coming up with the idea for the first St. Ignace Car Show to celebrate the country's bicentennial in 1976, Mr. Reavie has estab- lished the Antiques on the Bay Show and the Richard Crane Memorial Truck Show. Most recently, he has assisted with putting together an antique tractor parade and exhibit at Kewadin Casino.

Through the years, crowds have come from all over the world to attend the St. Ignace car events, which have been featured in magazines from Japan to Australia and Germany. The magazines are part of Mr. Reavie's collection.

Producing the events over all of those years taught Mr. Reavie and his crew that some features were successful, and some were not. Cruise nights, one of the most popular events at the original car show, got too big, too wild, and finally had to be canceled.

"Sometimes you over promote," Mr. Reavie said, "and that was a good, classic example."

At the peak of cruise nights, US-2 was transformed into a drag strip.

"First of all, it was Friday and Saturday night of the car show," he said. "You could almost feel it in the air. You could actually feel things were happening out there on west US-2 and, by the time it got over with, cars were lined up all the way beyond Mackinac Sales, both sides of the highway. The cops were right down the middle of the strip, 20 or 30 cop cars with their lights going and the cars are going right by them, getting rubber in second gear and glass-pack [mufflers] roaring. Oh, it was fun."

With the success of the St. Ignace Car Show, copycat shows sprang up in many communities.

"They all try it," said Mr. Reavie, although often, when organizers find out the amount of work that's required, they quit. "They think people are going to come to their town, but nobody goes to those shows anymore. The big shows are going to survive and the little shows are going to go away. That's how I see it. A lot of towns have tried to steal it, or bits and pieces of it, and it hasn't worked for them."

He never thought the car show would last this long and, today, he has no regrets. He has met most of his heroes, from custom car designers to Nascar and Formula One racers and none, he said, have disappointed him.

What was a disappointment, he said, was the failure of the rock and roll performances that were part of the car show in the early 1980s. He names a list of one-time Top Ten singers and groups that played at LaSalle High School, including Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Danny and the Juniors, Lesley Gore, and the Shirelles. Visitors to the show wanted to be on the street instead of in the auditorium, so after a few years, Mr. Reavie ended the music shows.

The new book includes a list of all of the guests of honor, all of the superstars who have visited St. Ignace, and photographs of people, cars, and St. Ignace sites. Giants of automotive design, cars owned by celebrities, and cast members from television's "Happy Days" and the movie "American Graffiti" have been among show highlights. The book concludes with photographs of the 2009 car and truck shows, including one of the most popular guests, John "Bo Duke" Schneider of "Dukes of Hazzard" fame. He is photographed climbing out of the "General Lee," a 1969 Dodge Charger. Also at the end of the book is a photograph of television's "Ice Road Trucker" Alex Debogorski. Mr. Debogorski heard about the Richard Crane Memorial Truck Show and asked if he could attend.

The book is expected to be available by mid-May for $21.99, published by Arcadia Publishing in South Carolina, the same company that published the St. Ignace Public Library historic photograph book, Les Bagley's Michigan State Ferries, Madeline Adie's Mackinaw City postcard history, and Mike Fornes' Mackinac Bridge books.

The process of sorting through Mr. Reavie's file cabinets filled with his notes and newspaper clippings and then choosing just the right photographs for the book began about a year ago. The book, he said, would not exist without the help of Judy Gross and Eileen Evers, both of St. Ignace.

Mr. Reavie retired last year as first vice president at First National Bank of St. Ignace and now devotes most of his time to planning the annual car and truck events. His passion for each show has not faded over the years, and he gets caught up in the planning. This year's shows are gaining momentum, he said, with reservations already being made and custom car builder Chuck Miller of Detroit the scheduled guest.

"Even in depressed economic times, people love their cars and trucks," he said.

Now, Mr. Reavie is working toward the 2011 car show and is meeting with actor Henry Winkler of "Happy Days" at the end of this month. He hopes scheduling works out to allow him to attend the show in another year.

"I get up every morning and wonder what cool thing is going to happen to me today," Mr. Reavie said. "Generally, something does before the day's over."